Light at the end of the tunnel

This week has been filled with pretty much the same as last week, mastering, mixing, editing, iterating and a lot of listening. It takes e certain amount of coffee to bear with these kinds of things because if you are unlucky, you could spend an entire day making sure one sound is just right, and that means playing it over and over and over and over again.

When dealing with a lot of sounds that are going to be played at the same time it’s important to make sure that each and everyone of them has an individual volume setting and in some cases it is really helpful to pan the sounds out in order to control from where the sound is coming from, not making sure to differentiate each sound can make it difficult to set them apart, therefore it is important to make sure your sounds are on different wavelengths and coming from different directions in order to prevent your audio from sounding sluggish and all melted together.

Things are slowly coming together for us and we are now down to finalizing our last artifacts and polishing the result, my job these past couple of days has been to test our game so far and listen for what sounds needs lowering or raising in volume, adjust these sounds and then put them back in. There are also some problems that can be really hard to notice if you don’t try them out in your game first, like for example if a sound needs speeding up or slowing down. One of the sounds I made was for when our melee type enemy swings his weapon and said weapon hits it’s target, I made this particular audio clip sound just like a bat swinging through the air and eventually end in loud thump, now while I was totally happy with how it sounded there was still a matter of making sure that the sound is synced with the animation, it is not a hard thing to do but when you have 20 sounds or more to adjust it can take a little while.

Melee enemy swinging his weapon.

Next week will be pure testing and balancing, I expect my job getting a lot easier when all of our sounds have been implemented because it is a lot more of an easy job to perfect something when all the pieces are there, at least for me personally.  It has been a long, loooooong road from idea to final product, but it seems like there is a bright light at the end of this tunnel, and I can almost see it.

Tying up loose ends

This week I’ve mostly been working on getting the final editing done to all of the sounds that we are going to use in our game. To ensure an even level of volume I had to apply either one of these tools – Audio normalization or Compression.

Audio Normalization
Audio normalization is the process of adding a constant amount of gain to an audio recording to bring the average or peak amplitude to a target level. What this means is that you change your recording’s overall volume by a fixed amount to reach a target level. There are 2 good reasons to normalize, getting the maximum volume or matching the audio of several recordings.

If you have a quiet audio file you may want to make it as loud as possible without changing its dynamic range. If you have a group of audio files at different volumes you may want to make them all as close as possible to the same volume. It may be individual snare hits or even full mixes.

Compression
Adding compression to a recording of, for example, an electric guitar can be a really great tool for balancing your audio. Normally, strumming the strings of your guitar really hard will make the sound it produces really loud and plucking a string lightly will in comparison make almost no sound at all. Compression solves this problem. Compression is the process of lessening the dynamic range between the loudest and quietest parts of an audio signal. This is done by boosting the quieter signals and attenuating the louder signals.

Normalization can be done automatically without changing the sound as compression does. While this is a huge advantage, it can’t replace compression, as it can’t affect the peaks in relation to the bulk of the sound. This means you have far less control.

In addition to mastering and editing the sounds I already had there were still a couple of them that I needed to create. One of them was a sound we had decided to call “Snooze you loose” which is the sound that will play when our character’s “pumpmeter” reaches zero and he falls asleep in the middle of a riot.

 ”Snoozers are loosers”

This is what I came up with:

http://cl.ly/2u3a2P2F2T3b

For this sound I played a low note on my guitar while using one of my effect pedals called Pitch Shifter, when pressed it will simulate the sound of a single note getting dropped several steps. You can control how low the tone will drop and how fast it will do so. When I was satisfied with that part of my sound I added some piano chords and toped the whole thing of with a lullaby style melody.

Aggressive Bystander – Voice-Overs

This week I’ve been focused on getting some voice-overs done for our game, voice-overs are essentially all of the sounds that can’t be produced using sound effects and digital tools in a DAW (digital audio workstation)

The sounds we were going to try and produce was the sounds of our various characters getting hit by various blunt objects or getting shot, there was also the matter of producing the sound of a crowd chanting various non-propaganda like chants which was sort of difficult. I started out with just randomly grunting into my microphone to try to simulate people getting shot or injured. The most difficult part of making the sound of our main character getting injured was to actually imitate an old man, which is harder than you might think.

After our recording session we ended up with a bunch of grunts and moans for the sounds called Enemy Melee, Range, AOE and Main Character Death and for the AOE enemy’s attack, which is essentially their chanting, we ended up with just a bunch of random chants and rhymes which I will edit in order to give the illusion of an actual crowd shouting out complaints and demands.

One of our Area of Effect enemies.

I haven’t had time to process these sounds like I have with all the other sfx I’ve done so far, for example adding some effects like delay, reverb, flanger, chorus and phaser. If you’re not familiar with any of these effects and would like to learn more I recommend clicking this link and read a bit about it.

http://www.uaudio.com/blog/modulation-effects-basics/

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may00/articles/reverb.htm

With these effects I can affect the way we perceive the sound itself, for example: where the sound is coming and if I’m successful you should also be able to tell how the surroundings look like without actually looking.

When recording your own audio it fairly vital to be able to add effects and to be able to process the audio in order to make it suit your needs. For example when producing the sound for an angry mob of protesters it might be nice knowing you don’t actually need to gather up a large crowd with each and everyone in the said crown wielding a megaphone, those things can be added digitally when processing your audio.  Of course if you happen to have a crowd of say…..oh, I don’t know….20 people laying around that comes with matching megaphones…I say go for it, but if you don’t, to master your audio digitally is very convenient.